"With pen and paper, it's easy to annotate. You can highlight text, circle relevant parts of an image, add comments, and doodle in the margins. Digital annotation is a bit trickier, but these annotations have the potential to be shared with a much wider audience. Because journalism increasingly presents us with a deluge of information in all forms, has an archival nature, and offers us a way to understand the world around us, journalism and annotation are natural BFFs.

Annotation has a long history as part of the original conception of the web. Today, the most common form of annotation we see online is commenting, which has a complex culture. Typically comments are buried at the bottom of the page, hard to sort through, and challenging to moderate. Location-specific annotations, when they exist, are often platform-specific (for now, that's the case here on FOLD, too).

This Wednesday, I attended the Annotation Summit hosted by the Poynter Foundation at the New York Times building to talk about some of these issues. The purpose of this event was to bring together people working on annotation from different angles (academics, makers of publishing platforms, members of standards groups, and media companies) to discuss how annotation can help reimagine journalism and strengthen democracy."

"That is, most students seemed to underline things that begged to be underlined. In nonfiction their pencils would anchor to the edges of paragraphs—to "topic sentences" or conclusory sentences—instead of middle-stuff (examples, anecdotes). In short stories they would inevitably underline the first and last sentences, the short one-sentence "money shot" paragraphs, and so on—the most epiphanic, purple prose. …

There is a feature on the Amazon Kindle called Popular Highlights…

This e-pluribus-unum-ing of reading—this intelligent bubbling-up of disparate readerly attentions—lets us answer questions about the private discourse of literate minds that just ten years ago would have been discarded for being too dreamy. …

Watching what people underline is a small example. What happens when you record someone write? Or when you record them talk?

If you think that searching a big index of web pages is cool, you haven't seen anything yet."

"printed books themselves are something of an anomaly...mark the only time in history we’ve mass produced perfect copies of literature, text & illustrations. We’ve assumed that’s been for the best. Certainly it was convienent. But why would we ever have assumed that it would last? As a species, we are glossers. That’s why there are signs in public & university libraries that read ‘No Marking or Highlighting in the Books’...we have an impulse to do that...If you look at the majority of texts from the Medieval manuscript codex, they are full of glosses. After all, it’s this era more than any other that defines for us the term ‘palimpsest’...until now...I think we’re in the process of correcting the anomaly of printed mass produced text...we’re going back to our natural instincts...bookmarking online...highlighting & commenting...also doing something unique in the history of our vandalism against text: we’re sharing our glosses globally with immediate effect...this isn’t limited to text."

"I’m a fairly quiet person who tends to be happy roaming solo in his own flow...Schooliness is Web 1.0 (if it’s web at all), and our students seem to prefer schooliness over anything new every bit as much as their teachers do. A word to the wise."